A Foggy Morning

Tonight may be Haloween for you, but here it’s La Castanyada, the eve of Tot Sants (November 1), the day when people go to visit the cemeteries, cleaning and decorating the niches of their deceased. For La Castanyada there are parties where people roast chestnuts (castanyes in Catalan) and sweet potatoes and eat as many panellets as they can afford. Panellets are marzipan cookies that come in many flavors, but the traditional ones are covered with pine nuts and are the most expensive. What am I saying? They are all very expensive. And while just about every holiday here has its related special food, often a pastry, for me Tot Sants with its panellets takes the cake.

When I lived in Tarragona, our apartment was across from the cemetery (we thought that would mean it would be quiet, but it didn’t really turn out that way) and we could watch the cemetery fill with flowers from our window. When I came to Figueres, I had to walk to get to the cemetery to see the flowers. And so I went. There are only two entrances to the cemetery and when I got there there were police cars all over the place and the street was closed off. A local gypsy had shot and killed a French gypsy over a drug dispute. In the cemetery. That saga went on for months, with others from the French clan coming here to kill a donkey or vandalize the home of someone in the local clan in revenge. The following year I skipped the visit to the cemetery.

I may go to the cemetery tomorrow, haven’t decided yet. But none of this has anything to do with today’s blog post. Early this morning when I took Cupcake out, it was a normal morning with some clouds. A little while later when we set off for Vilabertran to walk the path, we were fogged in. It is not often we get thick fog here and it turned the usual countryside into an other-worldly landscape.

Irrigation canal